Enigma
by theYellowDello
Summary: For the life of them, the other Hogwarts students cannot figure out how James Potter and Sirius Black, notorious troublemakers and defyers of authority, came to be under the thumb of docile Remus Lupin. Rated M for safety.
1. 1 Introducing Remus Lupin

Remus isn't meticulous about not breaking the rules. He's meticulous about not getting caught. With a reputation of being straight-laced, he can do a lot more behind the scenes.

Sometimes he feels bad about it, but it just seems to be in his nature. He seeks control anywhere he can find it, and that especially includes obsessively exploring and mapping out his environment, even in forbidden areas at forbidden times. In the nights leading up to the full moon, he finds himself too restless to sleep anyway—he may as well be sneaking around the castle.

He does this alone, of course. While not being exactly shy, Remus has a lot to hide, and somehow that has kept him from making anything other than the odd acquaintance in the year or so since his first day at Hogwarts.

Tonight, Remus is feeling his way through the Slytherin wing of the dungeons, all the while listening and sensing around for any lurking prefects or professors. His werewolf senses are exceptional, and he's never not recognized an incoming presence, but he is meticulous, so he has also put up several types of warning charms, all cast with himself at the radius: a magical concealment detection charm (it had the added bonus of helping him find hidden corridors), a little ward that set off a small sound fifteen meters away to distract anyone who stumbled across it, and even a heat detection charm he came up with himself that has the added bonus of working on animals (like an Animagus Professor McGonagall or Filch's cat Buttercup), although the radius was a bit small (only five meters) and the charm didn't go though walls. He has also put a sound dampening charm on himself, because even if he has the agility of a werewolf, he's still effected by gravity and his footfalls make a bit of noise.

A bleak greenish glow lights the stone corridor of the Hogwarts dungeons, and the strangeness of the light sends chills down Remus's spine. Every shadow seems sinister. A waft of teenage girl (perfume, cotton, shampoo) sends Remus ducking for cover into a hideaway he just discovered behind the tapestry of Rubella the Rhubarb Enchantress. Even in the pale green light of the dungeons, he can see through the tapestry enough to make out the shape of fifth-year Slytherin prefect Narcissa Black, walking down the hallway, presumably just starting her late night rounds.

He caught her scent before he heard her; that never happens. It was as if she'd come out of nowhere, and his warning spells were only just know letting him know. Remus grins. He must be getting close to the Slytherin common room. Yes, he does fully intend to map out that enemy territory. It occurs to him that the next upcoming Hogsmeade weekend might be a good time, if he can think of a way to clear out the younger students for a bit.

Miss Black's appearance must have thrown off his wards a bit, for it takes him much to long to notice them going off again, and with his hearing he can tell that two boys are coming down the corridor, whispering in argument, soon to turn the corridor and run right into the prefect. Which would be fine, except—

"Left is a sign of virtual omniscience, Sirius, as anyone who makes a study of elfish Nirvana should know," says one voice.

"Ha! You would think that. Did you ever think that the manticore circle would completely negate that?" said another.

––It's Potter and Black, his Gryffindor dormmates. They are as indecipherable as always, and they are about to walk into a prefect, the idiots.

_They're going to lose us fifty house points_, he sighs, and resigns himself to saving their arses.

Remus barely has time to throw a silencing spell at Potter, so when he grabs them both and yanks them into his hidey-hole, Remus resorts to throwing his arm around Black's mouth to keep the boy from crying out. Once behind the tapestry he lets James, who's still silenced, loose, and the boy whips around, his wand prepared to attack, before he recognizes Remus as his dormmate and just freezes instead. Once Remus sees that they see him, he holds a finger to his lips, pressing his ear against the tapestry to hear if the prefect has gone.

Nope. She walks right past them, even looking around the corridor for a bit, obviously hearing some of their scuffle.

Really. He's surprised this didn't happen sooner. It's completely obvious that Potter and Black sneak out most nights. They don't make any effort to conceal their movements, unlike himself, who has made a firm habit of drawing his bed curtains and setting silencing charms whether or not he's in bed.

The moment passes and Remus releases his hold on Black, but as the boy steps away their arms brush and Remus finds himself suddenly hissing in pain.

Shit.

He doesn't bother to look at his wrist, already knowing what he's going to see, instead pulling it behind his back to conceal. He's burned himself on Black's pretentious silver cufflinks. He can feel his skin bubbling and he knows it's going to be a bad one. Pure silver, it seems.

Neither Potter nor Black seem to have noticed, although Black is giving him a strange look that could mean any number of things.

"_Finite_," Remus whispers, reluctantly taking off the Silencing charm on Potter.

"Lupin?" they both say stupidly.

"Mr. Black, Mr. Potter." He acknowledges them with a nod of his head, and makes to leave.

"Well . . . okay?" Black looks taken aback, but does nothing, "See you around?"

But Potter stops his exit when he grabs Remus's robe, saying "What are you doing down here?"

Remus gives them a look, a why-the-hell-is-that-your-business sort of look, an eyebrow raised and a stony expression.

"I mean, thanks," says James awkwardly, "for hiding us."

"If you're going to sneak around after hours, you could at least use a little caution and try not to lose all our house points," Remus responds.

The two black-haired boys just shrug.

"Merlin, this is a brilliant hiding place," Sirius notes, changing the subject and looking around the tight space. "How did you find it?"

"I looked," Remus says simply. The arm behind his back is beginning to look a bit unnatural. He should leave.

"Another time then?" James calls out as Remus steps out of the hole and heads down the corridor, his wrist pulsing from the burn.

Remus ignores this, but he hears them muttering to each other as he makes his exit.

"Wait! Lupin!" he hears Black call out. He doesn't turn around, but they catch up to him. "We owe you one. Right Jamie?" he looks at his partner. "So, if you ever need anything . . . ," he says looking back at Remus.

"Of course," Remus says, fully intending to never call in on their offer. Also, he'd really like to go attend to his hand now.

It seems they're intending to walk back to Gryffindor tower with him, he observes looking at them sideaways. This is pretty annoying, as Remus wants to go to the Hospital Wing and get something for his burn, but he'd rather not draw their attention in that direction. With another throb of pain, he finally decides that the matter cannot wait. At the end of corridor, he simply turns the opposite direction of them.

"Later," he says, ignoring Potter's look of surprise and Black's proclamation of "Wha––,"and heads off in a direction that will take him to a shortcut to the Hospital Wing.


	2. 2 Domino Bookcases, Apparently

Remus Lupin is back to being mild-mannered, much to James and Sirius's disappointment.

The two boys hadn't paid Remus much attention before, only enough to notice that he seems exceedingly dull, prone to boring habits like reading by the fire, helping first-years with their homework, answering questions when professors asked them, and sitting up-right and proper while sipping tea at breakfast. All this boring instantly reappears when they see Remus the next day at school, and goes on long enough at that James proclaims his official disinterest in the Remus mystery and decides to move forward with his other schemes.

_Thank Merlin_, Remus thinks when he hears the proclamation. He was starting to get antsy with Black and Potter watching his every move, especially with the full moon coming in couple weeks. He didn't need or want the attention of two mischievous boys.

The Black-Potter duo are difficult to completely avoid though, as Remus finds out the next week.

Remus is sitting on the floor minding his own business, peacefully reading in an aisle between the bookshelves in the library, when he hears some kind of explosion and then a hoot of delight and the wild, maniacal laugher that could only belong to Sirius Black. An all-encompassing creaking noise has enveloped the room and there's a sound awfully similar to a hundred-thousand books falling off shelves, accompanied by ridiculously huge crashes that can only mean that the beautiful, elegant, _antique_, bookcases of the library are falling into each other like dominoes.

He has only a moment to be stunned before the charms books around him are falling onto the floor, some of which are shrieking their own displeasure at this turn of events.

"BLACK!" he shrieks murderously, pulling himself off the floor at the sight of the perpetrator racing past. The boy whirls around at the sound of his name, eyes wide when he spots Remus between the shelves.

The bookcase beside Remus is swaying ominously just from the reverberations of the other shelves and he leaps up to steady it, with some success, when another bookcase rams into it and all hope is lost. Waterfalls of books fall onto his head as the shelf tips over. One book of which manages to hit him with its corner just so, causing his vision to black out and bringing him to his knees. This turns out to be a good thing. Remus is very fortunate that he seems to be in the exact middle of the domino bookcases, which had apparently been set off from both sides, resulting in a protective tower that is the only reason he isn't crushed.

Remus is, understandably, momentarily dazed.

"Lupin! Shit!" says idiot Potter's voice.

"I don't know how this happened, we cast a wizard detection spell on this whole section of the library before we—" panics idiot Black.

"Come on Lupin—you know we wouldn't kill you on purpose!"

And they know they are in deep shit because this is Lupin and these are books and its pretty obvious that Lupin considers books to be holier than life, sex, and the Dalai Lama.

Remus can feel a murderous kind of rage building up in him, rage that overshadows the slitting headache and deep muscles bruises he expects from the shower of book he just received.

They are startled when Remus growls—actually growls—and swiftly gets up to wrench them by the cuffs of the robes, out of the library, ignoring their protests and dumping them unceremoniously outside the door. He leans in to whisper, feeling the effect will be stronger than him shouting, "Don't ever let me see your idiot faces in this library again." And he's pleased by the looks of sheer terror they give him, deciding that this horrible event may have the unforeseen benefit of Potter and Black actually leaving him alone.


	3. 3 Ramifications of Super Ability

So that happened.

Remus is alone on his bed, appreciating the coziness of his down bedcovers and grateful that the other boys are generally too hopped up with excitement or whatever it is to spend much time in the dull surroundings of the dorm room. Hogwarts has proven difficult for him in that it's so very nearly impossible to be alone, at least not in the places unforbidden.

Being around people is exhausting, he thinks. He's not sure why he feels that way, though. He's happy when he gets the opportunity to chat, to help another student with homework. Truly. But, their presence wears on him, like the drip of a leaking pipe into a small cup. It doesn't matter how much the sound of it soothes him, pretty soon he'll find there's no more room in the cup and the water spills over.

The quiet scratch of a quill on parchment is his solace, he finds, scribbling down a thought in his planner before switching back to his homework

~_Become proficient in both magical and muggle healing~_

finds it's place on the list just after

~_Choose a few large isolated areas you could reasonably get to, study the vegetation and fauna~_

His planner, or more like a journal, is something he recently started—to collect ideas for his future; he's begun to come to terms with the fact that he'll never be a part of wizarding society. So it's up to him to prepare himself, for a life of independence.

The other students don't seem to mind much, this constant presence of people, and Remus finds this strange. Maybe he finds it more wearing than the rest, because he never feels quite safe, being watched by other people. Perhaps he is that much more exhausted by the masses because he is so aware of them; he is constantly adjusting his behavior to prevent them from noticing anything off about him or from paying him much notice at all. It feels impossible for him to be at ease when others are around.

A drop of ink splatters onto his bedding and he is momentarily sidetracked in his attempt to remove the stain, searching his memory for the rarely used household spell that would vanish the spot.

Remus doesn't get to keep his comfortable solitude for long. He hears the arrival of one of the boys, and the scent more than the sound of the boy tells him that it is James Potter, with whom Remus is still feeling quite a bit sore. Happily, Potter seems to still be terrified of him; both Potter and Black will go to great lengths not to irritate him these days. The boy's presence at this moment is not unexpected. James Potter recently made a reading request through Remus—it had gone without saying that Potter and Black were no longer permitted in the library after last week's debacle. Ever since their near-death experience (they considered Remus's fury more deadly than an entire library of toppling bookcases), if James or Sirius actually needed to go to the library for something, all reading requests went through Remus Lupin.

James enters the silent dormitory and Remus ignores him, continuing to stare down at his parchment. James makes a quiet, nearly inaudible murmur from the other side of the room as he asks politely for the book he needed for his Defense report, his voice cracking in the middle. This pleases Remus to no end. He is sure to conceal that fact.

"If I see you so much as dog-ear a page, Potter, I'll cut your toes off," Remus says tonelessly as he hands off the book to Potter. He's keen to maintain his menacing aura for the time being.

Potter gives a squeak and darts back out of the room. Remus grins.

This pattern of behavior continues for several weeks.

For the life of them, the other students cannot figure out how James Potter and Sirius Black, notorious troublemakers and defyers of authority, came to be under the thumb of Remus Lupin. All anyone can say is that for some inexplicable reason, one look from Remus Lupin has the dastardly duo quaking in their boots.

James and Sirius are a little shocked by it too, the fact that a boy who had seemed so inconsequential was suddenly so thoroughly terrifying. They wonder why this thirteen year-old boy can scare them more than Dumbledore and McGonagall put together. Perhaps it is because it's clear Remus can meet them on the same level. Remus Lupin does not have to defer to humane methods of punishment like some authority figure for children would.

Or, perhaps, it's because they had watched him as he held up a thousand pound bookcase for six seconds, a feat which no second-year should be able to do.

Remus, in the meantime, wonders if he'll have to at some point make good on his threats to keep the idiots in line.

Even the professors take notice of the troublemakers' newfound respect for Remus and begin to manipulate this new dynamic to their advantage. In transfiguration on Tuesday, Sirius's not-so-subtle attempt to turn Judas Camry's hair into dried seaweed is easily foiled by one deadly look by Remus, and from then on McGonagall pairs Sirius with Remus in class.

Remus continues to address the boys as Mr. Potter and Mr. Black, switching to just plain Potter and Black when they are behaving particularly annoyingly. He trains them to the point that the use of their unadorned surnames will send a shiver down their spines.

To the other students, it's beginning to look like Remus Lupin will be the end of the Potter-Black reign of terror at the school, and several students have approached him with words of thanks, which he shrugs off. Personally, he doubts it will last.

Of course, Black and Potter quickly turn this into a joke.

"Remus Lupin, our Lord and Master!" he hears them call when he enters the common room, jumping to attention and giving him a salute.

"My liege," Potter bows, exiting backwards from their bathroom when Remus enters to shower.

"Lord Lupin! Give me your blessing on my raisin pie!" Black asks, shoving a pie under his nose after Charms class.

"Get that monstrosity out of my face," Remus rumbles dangerously, and they back away from him slowly. Up to this point, their antics have inspired little reaction from him, but having Black's once-again _silver _cufflinks near his face is not something he is okay with. Also, the existence of a raisin pie offends his being to its very core.

The next Monday Remus realizes that the two have been trying to surreptitiously test his strength. He doesn't noticed immediately, but several of his items are mysteriously heavy when he goes to gather them into his book bag. Two pairs of eyes are watching him with undue nonchalance, and he takes the spells off the rest of his things before placing them in his bag. He catches their eyes and raises an eyebrow, and goes on his way. He's not sure what they had been thinking, making his quill weigh as much as a dragon's egg. It was not subtle. Throughout the week they continue their attempts, trying their best to catch him off his guard while handing him inappropriately large objects.

When Potter and Black try to shove an actual anvil in his arms, an anvil they barely hold between the two of them, before dropping it on the floor and cracking the marble, Remus finds that he's getting a little fed up with this.

Rolling his eyes, Remus reaches down and picks it up with one arm and hands it back to them.

"My mother was a professional strongwoman," he tells them. They gawk. He leaves them to it.


End file.
